Literature Across Frontiers

Poetry Connections Europe – India

In association with Chandigarh literature festival

Literature Across Frontiers has been working with European and Indian poets for almost ten years now with workshops and performances held in Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Pondicherry, Pune and Trivandrum

In 2016 we will bring together three poets from Europe with Indian poets in Chandigarh in cooperation with Chandigarh Literature Festival Lit Live – and a partner in Delhi Apart from being poets, the European guests are also involved in poetry translation, publishing and literary event organisation.

Poets from Europe:

Yolanda Castaño

Yolanda Castaño (Santiago de Compostela, Spain 1977) has been publishing poetry for over twenty years. Her six collections have been awarded prizes such as The Spanish Critics’ Award, EspiralMaior, OjoCrítico ―for the best-published book by a young Spanish poet―, Novacaixagalicia, “Writer of the Year” ―by the Galician Federation of Bookshops― and she was a finalist in the National Poetry Prize. Bilingual editions (Galician-Spanish) of her most recent collections have been published by Visor Libros ―Libro de la Egoísta (2006), Profundidad de Campo (2009) and La segundalengua (2014). A dynamic cultural activist, Castaño has directed cultural projects with Galician and international poets since 2009: poetry translation workshops, an annual poetry festival, a monthly cycle of readings ―Galician Critics’ Prize for the best cultural initiative in 2014― apart from programming poetry events for other institutions. A poetry multimedia artist, she produced events around Europe and America, as well as in Tunisia, China and Japan. She worked for TV for several years ―Mestre Mateo Prize to the best TV Communicator in 2005― and contributed articles to a number of journals. Her writing has been translated into twenty different languages and she has edited and translated contemporary poets into Galician and Spanish. Castaño has also published five poetry books for children.

Adrian Grima

Adrian Grima (Malta,1968) is a prizewinning author of poetry collections and short stories for adults and adolescents in Maltese. He has read his poetry in many countries in the Mediterranean and Europe, and also in Australia, Nicaragua, and Bali and Makassar in Indonesia. Collections of his poetry in translation have appeared in English, German, Italian and French: The Tragedy of the Elephant (2005), Deciphered Lips (Northern Ireland, 2013), Adrian Grima (Berlin, 2010), La coda dellafreccia(Italy, 2011), and Iciarrivent les mouettes (2012). His most recent publication is Klin u KapriċċiOħra(KKM 2015) (Rosemary and other indulgences), his third solo collection of poems in Maltese.

Adrian Grima is also one of the founders of the cultural NGO Inzijamed and its Malta Mediaterranean Literature Festival, established in 2006. He teaches literature in the Department of Maltese at the University of Malta. He has written and edited a number of academic works, and read and published papers in many countries, focusing mainly on literature in the Mediterranean.

BraneMozetič

BraneMozetič (born in Ljubljana 1958) is a Slovenian poet, prose writer, an editor of the literary collections Aleph and Lambda, a translator from French (Rimbaud, Genet, Foucault, among others) and is known as an author of homo-erotic literature. His published work includes fourteen poetry collections, a book of short stories, three novels and four picture books for children. He edited four anthologies of LGBT literature and several presentations of contemporary Slovenian literature. He has forty books in translation, including his poetry book Banalije (Banalities, 2003) which was translated into 12 languages. He also organises translation workshops, reading tours of Slovenian authors abroad, and small literature festival. He has read his poetry at festival around the world.

Alexandra Büchler

Alexandra Büchler is Director of Literature Across Frontiers. A translator and editor of numerous publications, she has worked as cultural manager for thirty years, and served on the board of the advocacy network Culture Action Europe and of the UK Translators’ Association.

Her interest lies in the area literature and translation policies, European external cultural relations, and the role of civil society in international cultural activities and cultural policy development. She edits the series of research reports and surveys available on LAF website and is the editor of the New Voices from Europe and Beyond series of contemporary poetry anthologies from Arc Publications, UK. She has translated more than twenty-five books of fiction and poetry, and publications on visual arts and architecture, and edited six anthologies of short fiction, including collections of Czech writing in English translation and of Australian and Greek writing in translation into Czech. Among the authors she has translated into Czech are J.M. Coetzee, David Malouf, Janice Galloway, Gail Jones and Jeanette Turner Hospital. Her translation of the Czech modern classic The House of a Thousand Floors by Jan Weiss is forthcoming from the Central European University Press in 2016.

Poets from India:

Sampurna Chattarji

Sampurna Chattarji born in 1970, in Dessie, Ethiopia is a poet, novelist, translator and children author who writes in English. Her fourteen books include her poetry books, Absent Meus (Poetrywala, 2010) and her immensely popular book for children, The Fried Frog and other Funny Freaky Foodie Feisty Poems (Scholastic 2009); her novels, Rupture and Land of the Well (Both from the HarperCollins); as well as her collection of short stories about Bombay/Mumbai, Dirty Love (Penguin 2013). Sampurna is the Editor of the anthology Sweeping the Front Yard (Sparrow, 2010), which brings together Poetry and Prose by women writing in English, Malayalam, Telugu and Urdu. Her 2004 translation of Sukumar Ray’s Poetry and Prose has been a puffin Classic since 2008, under the title Wordygurdyboom!.

Her translation of the selected Poems of Joy Goswami (Harper Perennial, 2014) was shortlisted for the inaugural of Khushwant Singh Memorial Prize for Poetry. As a participant of International translation workshops, she has worked with Poets from Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France, Switzerland, Portugal, Holland, Iceland and Estonia. She has read her Poetry at festivals all over India and the UK, including at Hay-on-Wye, Ledbury Poetry festival and Alchemy 2015 as part of the “Walking Cities” Project celebrating the Dylan Thomas centenary.

Monika Kumar

Born in 1977 in Nakodar, a town in the Jalandhar district of Punjab (India), Monika Kumar did her post-graduation from Guru Nanak Dev University campus, Amritsar and her MPhil from Punjabi University, Patiala. She has worked as a faculty member in English departments at various colleges in rural Punjab and, briefly, in Jalandhar before coming to Chandigarh in 2009, where she currently works as assistant professor at the regional institute of English.

She enjoys reading world poetry and contemporary literary theory. This year she has been teaching British poetry and Indian Writing in English at the Institute, with a special focus on reading folk stories of the world. Her poems have been translated into Urdu, Punjabi and Croatian. She has translated some world poets like Zbigniew Herbert and Tomas Transtromer into Hindi, Zbigniew Herbert into Punjabi.

Her Poetry and Prose has been published in leading blogs and Hindi magazines. She writes a column for a Patna based magazine ’Rashtriy Prasang’ on various literary and social issues.

Surjit Patar

Born in a Punjab village in 1945, Surjit Patar is one of the most celebrated Punjabi poets . The range of his poetic forms includes very strict meters as well as blank and free dramatic verse . He is a poet who celebrates the beauty and mystery of Nature .He has published seven collections of poetry ,a book of prose and has adapted the plays of Lorca ,Giraudoux , Racine and Brecht into Punjabi .He is a recipient of Bhartiya Bhasha Parishad Panchnad Puruskar , Anaad Award , D.Litt (Honoris Causa ) ,Padma Shri and Saraswati Samman.